By Tom O’Connell
I am a veteran of the 1960’s New Left. I helped organize demonstrations in Minnesota against the Indochinese war and participated in small-scale efforts to build a new society from the ground up: communal living, free schools, community controlled neighborhood development.
Back in those days we had an unfortunate slogan, “Never trust anybody over thirty.” We were trying to construct a new world from scratch without realizing that in the not very distant past, there was an indigenous radical tradition flourishing right down the road. The discovery of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor movement and the cooperative commonwealth vision that animated it, gave me grounding and inspiration. Now that I think of it, Farmer-Laborites were commoning,1930’s style. Their story has direct relevance to our commons work today.
Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor movement created the most successful state-level third party in U.S. history. From its roots in 1918 as a coalition of populist farmers and an emerging labor movement, the Farmer-Labor movement became the state’s dominant political force from 1930 to 1938. Before its merger with with the Democratic party in 1944 to form the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, as it is still known in the state, the Farmer-Labor party gained three governors, four U.S. Senators, and eight members of U.S. House, and competed closely with the Republicans for majorities in the state legislature. Farmer-Labor administrations won hard-fought battles to halt farm foreclosures, aid the unemployed, regulate banking, conserve Minnesota’s lakes and forests, support cooperative enterprises and establish a progressive tax system.
The action was happening at the grass roots as well as in the halls of government. I was inspired to know that rural and urban Minnesotans by the thousands built political, economic and social institutions based on cooperative values and an enlarged vision of the common good. In turn, Minnesota’s Farmer-Laborites were drawing on a commons tradition rooted in the populist movements and early socialist experiments of the 1880’s and 90’s that extended far beyond Minnesota’s borders.
The discovery of that past made an alternative present—and future— seem possible. It still does.
Today there is a resurgence of interest in the commons. The word itself is suggestive without being prescriptive. It invites conversation. In neighborhoods and across national borders, people are creating commons-based approaches to preserving our air and water, building urban communities, rethinking economic relationships.
In his landmark book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, historian Peter Linebaugh reminds us that there is a rich commons history. That too ought to be part of the commons conversation. The story of the Cooperative Commonwealth as program, movement and metaphor is worth remembering for the insight it offers and questions it poses as we fashion our own commons history in the here and now.
The Minnesota Radical Tradition
On May 25th, 1934, Minnesota’s charismatic Farmer-Labor governor, Floyd Olson delivered a fiery speech to the delegates assembled at the Farmer-Labor Party’s state convention in St. Paul. Olson had reason to be fiery. After the high hope of FDR’s first 100 days, reform energy had subsided. Republican opposition to the New Deal and the more radical Farmer-Labor reform program at the state level was unabated. After some signs of recovery in 1933, the cold grip of the Depression tightened once again. Olson concluded his speech with fighting words that delighted his audience. “ I am what I want to be… I am a radical.”
The next day convention delegates endorsed a platform that expressed what they wanted to be. The Cooperative Commonwealth platform of 1934 deserves a place along side the 1898 Omaha Platform of the Populist Party as the clearest statement of indigenous American radicalism: an eclectic mixture of the prairie populist, democratic socialist, and progressive reform traditions. In a dramatic preamble, the platform’s drafters declared that only a “complete reorganization of our social structure in to a cooperative common wealth will bring economic security and prevent a prolonged period of further suffering among the people.”
We declare that capitalism has failed and that immediate steps must be taken by the people to abolish capitalism in a peaceful and lawful, manner and that a new sane and just society must be established, a system in which all the natural resources, machinery of production, transportation, and communications shall be owned by the government and operated democratically for the benefit of all the people, and not for the benefit of the few.
The platform went on to support, “public ownership of all mines, water power, transportation and communications systems, banks, packing plants, factories, and all public utilities.” It called for a state takeover of idle factories to employ “idle citizens and distribute the products to the needy.” It pledged state support for consumer cooperatives, a two-year extension of the mortgage moratorium on farm closures, social insurance programs run by the state and operated without profit, and a steep tax on large incomes and inheritances.
The 1934 platform was an expression of a rising social movement. The delegates who assembled in St. Paul were not simply ideologues, operating as isolated individuals. They were often members of labor unions, cooperatives, farm organizations, and year round active Farmer-Labor clubs. The programs they adopted represented both the expression of a deep popular radical tradition and the aspirations of thousands of Minnesotans laid low by the Depression.
The bold statement in the preamble, “Capitalism has failed,” was more then a visionary prognosis, it was a description of the obvious. Capitalism had failed hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans in towns and cities, in shops and farms across the state. It was time, the delegates felt, to get on with the reconstruction work.
Not all Minnesotans agreed. The adoption of the cooperative commonwealth platform set off a storm of media denunciation. Seeing visions of electoral redemption, leaders of Minnesota’s badly weakened Republican Party fanned the flames. Even Farmer-Labor officials began to wonder if the movement’s Magna Charta might prove to be the party’s last will and testament.
Soon after the convention, staffers at Farmer-Labor Party headquarters sequestered the original platform document and issued an “annotated version.” The public ownership planks were explained away as ultimate goals that in any case would require national action. State ownership of electric power would require a vote of the people; no need to worry about that either. The platform was a momentary indiscretion; an object warning of what happens when radical enthusiasm trumps political pragmatism.
Or, at least, that is the version most historians have presented. But a closer look reveals that Farmer-Laborites continued to campaign on cooperative commonwealth themes throughout the election of 1934 and promote the expansion of cooperatives and public ownership through 1938.
The Minnesota Leader, the official voice of the movement, published story after story illustrating the successful application of cooperative commonwealth principles. Its writers saw expression of the common wealth idea in Scandinavian social democracy, small-town cooperatives, municipally owned electric utilities, and CCC conservation programs. Not content to limit its scope to 1930’s or the Mid-West, the Leader featured mini-histories and cultural lessons, like the feature story headlined “Co-OP Commonwealth Reared Inca Culture 400 years earlier.”
If some party leaders were nervous about the reach of the 1934 platform’s embrace of public ownership, there was no retreat from the general principle. Week in and week out, The Leader’s masthead featured this quote form the FLP’s statement of principles: “The Farmer-Labor Party aims to establish a system of public ownership of monopolized industries.” And next to it: “The people can not effectively control something they do not own.”
What ever reservations Governor Olson had about some of the platform specifics, he applied his renowned oratorical skills in support of the cooperative commonwealth theme. In a major radio address later that summer, he described the cooperative commonwealth as an “ideal society” which would “bring about a more equitable distribution of the fruits of labor to all the people. He went on to explain basic principles of cooperative economics. “Under cooperative laws the dividends paid into surplus are limited, and instead of paying out profits in the form of dividends to the few, they would be paid out in the form of increased wages and lower consumer costs to the many.”
Olson, like many Farmer-Laborites were struck by the contrast between the vastness of the nation’s wealth and productive capability and the inability of economic system to deliver that wealth to the American people. The privatization of the economic system at the top, had left the farmer, the small business owner and the worker left out. The task, the governor asserted was to transform a system that rewarded the few to a system based on production for use; to in a phrase, harness wealth for the commonwealth.
Nor was the governor alone in invoking cooperative commonwealth language. In May, the Minnesota Leader hailed a national survey published by Literary Digest in which over 20,000 ministers, priests and rabbis endorsed a cooperative commonwealth system. When asked to choose between economic systems, 5 % of the survey respondents favored capitalism or “rugged individualism” and 88% were for a cooperative commonwealth. Of those favoring a cooperative commonwealth, 51 % said a drastically reformed capitalism would be the best means to achieve it, 28% were for socialism. The survey was not scientific. It demonstrated, however, the common use of the commonwealth metaphor and the flexibility in which progressives of the day employed it.
As a set of ideas the cooperative commonwealth is best understood as a world view, rather than a specific political program. But world view divorced from practice is a hollow thing—what we used to call in the 1960’s a “head trip.” It was the experience of commoning that grounded the world view and gave it social and political power. This included the wide-spread experience of rural (and some urban) Minnesotans with cooperatives.
Beginning with the populist movements of the late 1800’s farmers combined economic with political organizing. Most of the early attempts at building rural cooperatives failed, but by 1930 in Minnesota and the Upper Northwest, farmers had built strong and grain and dairy cooperatives to gain market-power for the products they produced. It was consumer cooperatives rather that came to dominate the cooperative movement. CENEX organized buying clubs for joint purchase of key farm supplies. Midland Cooperative Wholesale sold petroleum products and automotive supplies to cooperative oil associations. The Northern Cooperative League, rooted in the radical Finnish immigrant tradition, operated dozens of coop stores in Minnesota’s Iron Range and Lake Superior region. By 1935, Minnesota had 2,886 consumer coops with a combined membership of 531,180—the most in the nation.
In September, 1936, Lowell Gunderson, a visiting New York Times reporter, gave his readers an almost breathless description of Minnesota’s coop boom.
One buys apples at little country coops, fills his gas tank at cooperative service stations, wanders through huge cooperative medical and auditing talks over cooperative telephones, visits well furnished cooperative medical nd auditing offices, sleeps in a cooperative boarding house, eats in a cooperative café, reads tombstones in a cooperative cemetery. And one ends up a trifle amazed. On the surface these enterprises look like any other business, yet in method and principle they are in direct contrast.
Not all coop members saw themselves as building a cooperative common wealth. Members of the Republican orientated Farm Bureau s tended to see cooperatives as strictly a business proposition. Midland coop organizers, on the other hand, preached the gospel of consumer cooperation with an almost religious fervor.
Some cooperative organizations affiliated directly with the Farmer-Labor Association—the constituency-based organization that formed the base for the Party. They participated in state government efforts to expand the range of cooperative organizing, including an ambitious plan to organize rural electric cooperatives. Some shared the view of nation’s most influential coop advocate, Dr. J.P Warbasse. He saw consumer cooperation as an antidote to the “fading state,” where individuals acting collectively will administer the goods and services necessary to a modern economy.
Whatever the specific ideology of cooperative members, the cooperative experience itself offered rural Minnesotans the opportunity to develop democratic muscle. The local cooperative provided an alternative route to civic leadership without having to adopt the values of the small town Chamber of Commerce fraternity. In the case of Minnesota’s Farmer –Labor movement, cooperative organization also provided on the job training and social relationships for effective political leadership.
In the end, Governor Olson was elected to a third term in 1934 after the issuing of the radical platform. The workers of the Twin Cities and Iron Range voted more heavily Farmer-Labor then ever before. The populist grain farmers in the Red River Valley and West Central counties continued their support. The Farmer Labor party lost the small business vote and some of the more prosperous mixed-crop farmers in the South East of the state. Perhaps a less radical platform could have won more votes in 1934. Or perhaps the energetic and forthright presentation of a bold social vision energized a grass roots based looking for a way out of the Great Depression.
In any case, The Farmer-Labor party and the larger Farmer-Labor movement it represented , would continue to be a major force in Minnesota politics throughout the 1930’s. Nor was the impact of cooperative commonwealth thinking limited to Minnesota. Similar political groupings, though on a more modest level, were operating in throughout the Upper Midwest and Northwest. For a brief time, there was even talk of a national Cooperative Commonwealth Party to challenge FDR’s New Deal.
The most enduring political legacy however, occurred in Saskatchewan where the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, formed in the 1932, went on to dominate provincial government from 1944 until 1960, when it became the New Democratic Party. One legacy of the commonwealth tradition is Canada’s national health insurance systems, which was pioneered in Saskatchewan during the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.
What’s In a Memory?
Social movements develop in the space between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Movements are rooted in the present and stretch out to fashion an alternative future. But the present itself is deeply influenced by the past. In the 1930’s capitalism had failed. The Cooperative Commonwealth vision offered a view—though hardly a road map—to one version of that alternative future. The New Deal welfare state became that alternative future. In promoting the common wealth, Farmer-Laborites helped create something more modest; a state political culture which featured (in U.S. terms at least) an unusually strong emphasis on the common good.
Today we are facing another crises in the system. The neo-conservative drive to “enclose” just about everything has radically weakened public institutions, threatened our common natural resources and damaged our economy. The crisis is both structural and ideological. We need to think and act anew. The Farmer-Labor movement engaged thousands in re-thinking their social world and acting to create a new world. How did they do it? What can reflection on this—and many other social movements—teach us about the dynamics and patterns of movement building.
There are also more specific questions for today’s commoners:
*How were the cooperatives organized?
*Where do they fit in a broader commons framework?
*What does cooperative history suggest about the relationship between scale, social participation and economic efficiency?
*Where does public ownership fit in the contemporary commons vision?
*Are there dynamics in earlier experiments with municipal ownership that can be helpful to constructing a commons practice today?
*What public policies support or get in the way of building the commons?
*Are there lessons to learn in the fight over control of rural electrification for today’s efforts to construct locally controlled renewable energy technologies?
*Farmer-Laborites (and their populist forebears) struggled for public ownership of the banking system. Are there dynamics from that experience that might help us challenge the hyper commodification of money today?
Questions like these rarely yield direct answers. We can’t put past experience on a time machine, dust it off, and adopt it unchanged for today. But asking the questions can shine a light on persistent patterns and dynamics. Reflecting on them can provide insight to our common work today.
Finally, this history is important for what it suggests about language. The cooperative commonwealth was a powerfully evocative phrase. Like the commons itself, it was suggestive, but not definitive. The worldview it conjured was roomy—a big tent that could hold working class socialists, urban progressives, rural populists. Indeed the challenge of the 1934 platform was that it gave programmatic flesh to a warm and largely accepted metaphor. Too much detail, thank you.
The meanings words convey can connect a latent past with a changing present. The cooperative commonwealth lost its conjuring magic because the world changed. The world is changing again.
What does cooperation mean today? Where do we see it? What is wealth anyway? And what wealth is—or ought to be— common? Inviting reflection on these questions is itself a key part of commons work. As a writer for the Farmer-Labor Leader put it back in 1936, “Don’t envy the old timers who got their experience in building the foundations of the movement. Get in yourself for the building that is ahead.”